Lemon Project Society; student volunteer society named to commemorate Lemon
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Lemon
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Lemon Project Society; student volunteer society named to commemorate Lemon
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In Fall 2018 under the leadership of Dr. Jody Allen and Dr. Sarah Thomas, the Lemon Project team founded the Lemon Project Society, an undergraduate and graduate student volunteer society, to support the mission and goals of the Lemon Project. The Lemon Project Society is a student volunteer organization that supports the Lemon Project’s efforts to rectify wrongs perpetrated against African Americans by William & Mary and to build bridges between the University and Williamsburg and Greater Tidewater area and facilitates academic and extracurricular opportunities for students. Through word of mouth and generous donations from supporters, the budget of the Lemon Project Society was crowd funded.
The Lemon Project Society named for Lemon, a man who was enslaved by William & Mary in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lemon was legally the property of William & Mary. As an enslaved man in Virginia, he owned neither his work nor his own person. But he grew and sold produce to the College, and he received a monetary Christmas bonus from the faculty at least once. Even from scant evidence, we can tell that Lemon was an actor on the stage of history, using ingenuity to help mitigate the circumstances of his enslavement. We do not know why the faculty gave Lemon a Christmas bonus in 1808, but there is evidence that the white professors took Lemon’s well-being into some consideration. In 1815, an aging Lemon was given an allowance to purchase his own food, and William & Mary paid for his medicine in 1816. Finally, in 1817 the university paid for the coffin in which Lemon was buried.
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Allen, Jody
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December 2018
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The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation
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